THE PLUCK OF ENGLISH YOUTH.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 36, 17 November 1871, Page 3

THE PLUCK OF ENGLISH YOUTH.

When the Iron Duke remarked that Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton, he referred generally to the tone engendered in English youth by English games, and to early habits of discipline. But, apart, from that, if any sport more than another can make a man steadyunder fire, it would be a bit of cricket on an offday upon a crowded school or college ground, half a dozen wickets pitched parallel, within fifteen yards apiece of one another —a couple of bowlers, with the pace of catapults, one down and the other come on—ground rather lumpy, the best levels being reserved for match-playing—-and a constant fusilade from right and left, as first one, then another, of the other batsmen in line cuts a ball sharp to cover point, or hits to square leg, within a few inches of bis fellow bateman’s skull. This would we fancy, unsettle the nonchalance of many a Prussian similarly located. But an English lad swipes away as unconcernedly as if there was at the moment no one but himself and the bowler in the world. The oarsman who though three lengths behind at Chiswick, bears down his adversary by an unflinching chase through Coruey Reach, or who, pressed hard night after night to a question of inches in bumping races, keeps his head and his spuit for the critical finish at (Jherwell, and saves flag by a timely spurt with a beaten c:ew under the barges, would not have surrendered Metz off hand like Bazaine. The horseman who does not flinch from a thorny bullfinch, nulla penetrablis astro, or who unswervingly urges a tired and stumbling steeplechaser twenty miles an hour at the fence into the winning field, would need no stimulant to take his part in a cavalry charge. And the sport of half-an-liour’s scratch play, as above described, on an English cricket-ground, would read the lesson to a foreign lookeron, that an Anglo-Saxon has not yet found his cquel for cool steadiness under fire. —Land and Water